That’s a nice overview, and clearly a lot of work went into it. It shows the many relationships Sivers has. But he draws the wrong conclusion from it. He says, “Sivers is the CPO chokepoint for Hyperscalers.” It isn’t. A chokepoint is a place everyone has to pass through and nobody can route around. Sivers is involved a little bit everywhere, but irreplaceable nowhere. Whoever talks to everyone is firmly married to no one. He even writes it himself: the big customers always buy from several suppliers at once. If you’re replaceable, you’re not a chokepoint, and you have little pricing power. As I described in my article, the real chokepoint sits one stage higher, and that’s where Sivers itself is standing in line. There is no shortage of laser designs. There is a shortage of factories to build them. And Sivers doesn’t own those factories. at that stage Sivers is just a customer. The chokepoint belongs to others: the firms with their own fabs (Coherent, Lumentum), the equipment makers behind them (Aixtron), and the substrate suppliers. The fact that Lumentum currently even has to buy lasers on the open market, because its own capacity is being prioritized toward Nvidia, could indeed help Sivers in the short term, but that’s a Phase 1 effect, not a permanent state. You could argue the opposite, that Sivers profits precisely from this. But once you ask why Lumentum has to reach into the market in the first place, the answer leads right back to the actual chokepoints, and those apply to Sivers even more than to Lumentum. Sivers’ strong position as one of currently few firms with the relevant laser IP will also weaken over time, because it’s reasonable to expect that more large competitors will close the gap. The real chokepoints further down in production prevent Sivers from exploiting this lead during this phase. And by the time those chokepoints are resolved, the competition will probably already have caught up. The company can still succeed, no question. But the claim that Sivers is a permanently indispensable chokepoint is simply wrong. Serenity probably knows this himself, and is deliberately framing it that way. Everyone who has followed him so far, and who also has a stake in Sivers succeeding, hopes that what he says is true. He’s exploiting confirmation bias. So don’t forget to question things critically. Whoever stops doing that loses the ability over time entirely, and then your wellbeing always hangs on the people you follow. Sivers is well connected, but not irreplaceable. Those are two different things, and on the market that difference is what matters in the long run.
